Issue 1

In this paper, we will analyze the relationship between Revolution and Terror by focusing on the example of the Jacobin Terror in 1793. After reviewing the classical interpretations of Hannah Arendt and C. Lefort, the problem of Terror is approached from a phenomenological analysis of the Body Politic, its incarnation in the body of the monarch and the threat of its disincorporation. We are particularly interested in the designation of the King and Queen as absolute enemies, through caricatures that represent them as dangerous or vile animals. Using Michelet and Quinet's critique of the “Jacobin Inquisition,” the ambivalent meaning of regicide is finally understood as transfer of sovereignty and matrix of Terror.

Scholars around the world have discussed the ontological possibilities of transnational social movements. This article addresses these possibilities, highlighting how two renowned social movements have (re)constructed time as an ontological category through their performative activities and publicly argued beliefs. Departing from Giorgio Agamben’s work on messianic time, the article discusses how the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and the Spanish 15-M Movement (also known as the Indignados), have tried to recover the allegedly lost subjectivity of their members through the refusal to act in keeping with linear conceptions of time. These movements have tried to seize time and retrieve political personhood through particular spatial and temporal performativities. Both movements, which emerged in particularly traumatic historical periods, embody a non-linear and messianic understanding of time. The article argues, however, that the movements have translated this non-linear understanding of time through different messianic resources, namely, particular temporal and spatial performativities.

The defining trait of street performances is that they catch their audience members unawares, while they are walking on the streets minding their own business. They recruit unsuspecting pedestrians and transform them into active participants in a street performance. This is what enables us to compare the transformative operation of street theater to what philosopher Louis Althusser described as the operation of ideological interpellation. In the first part of the paper the author discusses several ways of separating these two interpellations, drawing from examples by Robert Pfaller, Mladen Dolar, Slavoj Žižek and Blaise Pascal. In the second part of the paper, the author discusses examples of the Slovenian group Laibach, interventions by the Rebel Clown Army and the “Standing Man” protests in Turkey, arguing that artistic practices can be subversive with respect to the dominant ideology, when they are able to occupy the position of ideology’s blind spot.

This article contextualizes the recent social uprisings in Maribor as a political articulation of the periphery in both the local Slovenian and the more general European context. The case of Maribor is of particular interest to anyone who wants to excavate different temporalities within “transition”: Maribor is not only the name of a failed capitalist de-industrialization, but was, 25 years ago, also the site of a failed socialist industrialization. My thesis explores the continuity and discontinuity of Maribor as a privileged site of popular resistance, while on a more theoretical level, it presents the unfolding of politics of dissensus. The author uses Rancière’s concept of “the people” as the most adequate figure for addressing the specificity of the most recent struggles. Also, the question of “periphery” as the site of utmost importance for contemporary political imagination and experimentation is brought to the reader’s attention.

The article deals with the mass civic protests that shook Russia in 2011–2012. The article examines the question of populist and ideological self-determination on the part of the protesters qua political subjects. Based on a group empirical study of protest rally participants, the author points to the frequent populist self-identification used by the protesters. They called themselves “the people,” although they obviously represent a minority, and share some special features such as a relatively high level of education and income. The article analyzes this phenomenon within the context of the theory of populism. It reconsiders some aspects of this theory and identifies the Russian case as a historically new but currently quite typical version of populism.

The article discusses issues of urban public space in Russian cities within the context of the 2011–2012 anti-electoral fraud protests. The role of urban public space and its contestation has been central to the debate around the worldwide Occupy movement, but it is important to contextualize the protest movements in terms of national and local developments in the uses of public space. Therefore, the article focuses on post-socialist transformations of public space in the Russian cities of Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Representations and perceptions of public space are examined via media analysis (including mass media reports, blog entries, and official documents). The analysis shows that public space was important for the Russian anti-electoral protests in 2011–2012: protesters attempted to reclaim central and symbolically loaded parts of the city and thus regain political power as well. Rallies and street protests have not been the only ways of reclaiming public space, however. A variety of direct actions have also been aimed at transforming urban space.